Does anybody know why these names were selected for Capybara and Cucumber? Or were they just picked randomly?
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Cucumber and Capybara, in this context, are tools used by Ruby programmers. For that reason, the off-topic reason "... [is] about general computing and hardware" does not reply. It's something of a trivia question--nobody will ever need to know the answer to use either of these tools--but it should be left open, especially since its answer is based on fact + pretty solid conjecture--no opinion needed. – Wayne Conrad May 06 '16 at 17:51
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Cucumber was written by Aslak Hellesøy and named by his fiancee. He asked her for a "catchy, non-geeky sounding name" to replace its provisional name, "Stories".
The name Capybara appears to be a play on "webrat", the name of a similar library which predated Capybara. (An actual capybara is a large rodent native to South America, not really a "rat" but related.)
Dave Schweisguth
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